"The Israeli-American conservative nexus
"Eli, the West Bank settlement Hazony moved to after finishing his American education in the early 1990s, is one of many illegal Jewish communities in the majority-Palestinian territory. Started by a handful of settlers in 1984, Eli today boasts a population of over 4,000, growth that has come at the expense of nearby Palestinian communities.
"During my trip, I drove up Route 60, the major north-south thoroughfare in the West Bank along which Eli sits. From the highway, Eli doesn’t look like a particularly remarkable place: a collection of the characteristically Israeli light-colored homes with red roofs that dot the West Bank, clearly distinguishable from nearby Palestinian villages.
"You see small communities like this all around the West Bank, each one creating an Israeli-imposed security bubble that can justify land seizures and cut off Palestinian communities from each other. Eli is one cog in the vast machinery of the West Bank occupation; the larger and more entrenched these communities get, the harder it is to imagine Israel ever evacuating them — a seemingly necessary step if a contiguous, viable Palestinian state is to be created.
"Eli is a physical symbol of the most aggressive right-wing form of Israeli nationalism, a religiously informed territorial maximalism that sees Jews and only Jews as the rightful owners of the biblical Holy Land.
. . .
"Thinkers in the Tikvah orbit generally take an aggressive line on the conflict with the Palestinians, including a hardline defense of the West Bank settlement movement. Their papers and articles defend the wisdom and legality of the settlement enterprise; this June, Leiter published an open letter to American Christians calling on them to lobby Trump on behalf of Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank. It was signed “your friend from Eli.”
“There is no right-wing movement in Israel. What you see is a settler’s movement,” says Stav Shaffir, a former member of the Knesset for the center-left Labor Party.
. . ."Hazony, perhaps the paradigmatic case of an Israeli whose worldview has been shaped by time in the States, has been a player in Tikvah-world. The organization provided early funding for perhaps his most influential creation, Jerusalem’s Shalem Center — a right-wing think tank that has morphed into Shalem College, Israel’s first American-style private liberal arts college.
. . .
"If you read Hazony’s work carefully, it becomes evident that his vision for the global right is a universalization of the Israeli settler’s mindset: a religious nationalism that has some key points of agreement with Trumpists and the European far right.
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"Its keynote speakers were some of the leading figures in the post-Trump “future of conservatism” conversations — Sen. Hawley, Fox’s Carlson, and venture capitalist Thiel. Hazony is working with some A-list American talent: Christopher DeMuth, the head of the influential American Enterprise Institute from 1986-2008, currently serves as the chairman of the National Conservatism Conference.
. . .
"There is an increasing sense of a “nationalist international” — the idea that various right-wing parties need to band together and fight against the liberal-progressive vision for a more globalized world. Some of the efforts to codify this idea, like Steve Bannon’s laughable organization called “The Movement” in Europe, have failed.
"But the success of the American intervention in Israeli politics, and the global rise of Yoram Hazony, shows how it might actually work: how globalization can fuse political traditions of distinct conservative movements, connecting the halls of power in Washington to the settlers in Eli.” Stop
Or as Mussolini’s fascists would have recognized it as, and aspired to: a “Fascist International,” as parties making up “Universal Fascism,” to not use euphemistic language.
On Mar 25, 2023, at 11:41 AM, Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--From: Allan Brownfeld <abrownfeld@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 25, 2023This is a letter I have sent to the Washington Post about their full page article about the right-wing Israeli think tank Kohelet.To the editor,Washington Post.The Washington Post has performed a notable public service by publishing the important article, “The Secretive Israeli Think Tank Behind Netanyahu’s Judicial Overhaul.”This think tank, Kohelet Policy Forum, has long advocated for annexation of the West Bank, gender segregation inside Israel, and a weaker Supreme Court. It has contempt for non-Orthodox streams of Judaism and for the rights not only of Palestinians but of the LGBTQ community and of women. It is largely financially supported by ultra-Orthodox Jewish Americans.The policies of Israel’s far-right government have been rejected by the overwhelming majority of American Jews, including such traditional supporters of Israel as Abraham Foxman, the long-time leader of the Anti-Defamation League, Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, and the leaders of Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.When Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out” and said, “there’s no such thing as Palestinians,” visited Washington earlier this month, no member of the Biden administration would meet with him. Neither would any of the major American Jewish organizations. William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations, called his statements “disgusting.”Zionism itself is becoming a minority view within the Jewish community. Zionism proclaims that Israel is the “homeland” of all Jews and that Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile.” In fact, Judaism is a religion of universal values, not a nationality. The homeland of Jewish Americans is the United States. They are American by nationality and Jews by religion, just as other Americans are Protestant, Catholic or Muslim.In 1841, in the dedication of America’s first Reform synagogue in Charleston, South Carolina, Rabbi Gustav Poznanski told the congregation, “This country is our Palestine, this city our Jerusalem, this house of God our temple.”Israel would do well to confine its concerns to its own citizens. Almost all Jewish Americans believe in freedom of religion and separation of church and state. Israel, sadly, is a theocracy. Non-Orthodox rabbis cannot perform weddings, conduct funerals, or have their conversions recognized. In fact, Jews have less religious freedom in Israel than anyplace in the Western world.Shira Rubin has performed a notable service with her article about Kohelet Policy Forum.Sincerely,Allan C. Brownfeld,Editor of ISSUES,The quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism
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